In today's market place, retail goods are often mass produced then shipped in bulk to central warehouses prior to being distributed to individual local retail establishments.
The retail goods may be shipped in bulk on large pallets to the central warehouses. For example, a pallet of numerous cases of individual products such as, for example, bottles or cans of beverages. The cases will be stacked in several layers on the pallets. For example, a pallet of cases may include a single layer of cases that is five cases wide along each side for a total of twenty five cases per layer. The pallet may include five or six layers of cases. As such, a single pallet my include approximately 125 to 150 cases of products.
At the central warehouses, the bulk pallets may or may not be broken down into smaller units of cases to be delivered to the individual retail establishments. For example, a local retail establishment may order high volume items by the full pallet, but smaller volume items by partial pallets. Further, a retail establishment may order hundreds of different items.
Unfortunately, it can be very time consuming and labor intensive to manually organize and prepare the individual orders for each of the different retail establishments.
Some attempts have been made to create picking devices that will pick layers of product from a pallet and then move them to a different location where an individual order is being filled. These devices typically require squeezing the items together from the outer rows of items. As such, the outer rows of items press into the inner rows of items when the layer is lifted. It is the pressure between the outer rows and adjacent inner rows that allows for lifting the entire layer.
Unfortunately, the configuration of the packaging for many items prevents good pressing of the various adjacent rows into one another resulting in loose items in the layer. The loose items will fall out of the layer when lifted by the picking device creating instability in the pressure which will ultimately result in the entire layer of product falling out from the grasp of the picking device.
Further yet, prior picking devices typically could only pick full layers of items. Unfortunately, if a retailer only wanted a partial layer of items, the picking device could not be used for such selection of items. For example, if a retailer only wanted 15 cases of one type of beverage from a pallet identified above, the picking device could not fill that order because the picking device could not get between the various rows to only take 3 rows of cases.
There exists, therefore, a need in the art for an improved lifting system. The invention provides improvements over prior lifting system for picking products from a pallet in full or partial pallet quantities.